Twenty years ago, I taught people how to use PCs. I worked for a training company that made quite a bit of money migrating users from WordPerfect to MS Word, from Lotus 1–2–3 to Excel, and from dBase to Access. And I earned a generous living writing courseware for Microsoft Windows workshops and teaching Visual Basic in two-day programming classes.

Fortunately, I switched careers and escaped the PC training industry before it all collapsed.

Nowadays, nobody I know attends a two-day class to learn how to use an iOS or Android device, even though these ecosystems are more complex than the PCs of twenty years ago. The industry has become a lot smarter. The software itself teaches people how to use it, at the moment when they need to know. Why bother storing knowledge in people’s heads with a workshop? Continuously changing software is the new normal. We learn how to use it on the fly, depending on our context.

The Inevitable

In his book The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly writes that, as humans, we are becoming the “eternal newbies”. The world around us changes faster and faster. It’s impossible to keep up and store all kinds of knowledge in our heads. The half-time of information keeps shrinking every year. In many cases, it’s better to store knowledge in software rather than in wetware and only serve it up at the moment when someone needs it.

Ironically, when I wanted to highlight a paragraph in The Inevitable, it appeared that the highlighting feature of the Kindle app had changed. I had to re-learn how highlighting worked, and the software taught me, immediately proving Kevin Kelly’s point.

Does anyone still buy maps at gas stations to learn how to get from A to B? I don’t because I ask software to navigate me through traffic at the moment when I need this. Learning a city’s layout comes with actively exploring and navigating, not from studying maps in a course. I firmly believe that we will experience the same in organizations.

No More Agile Courses

An entire agile training industry has emerged around the transformation of command-and-control companies. Scrum classes, Kanban classes, SAFe workshops, Management 3.0 workshops, the list of agile brands is long and impressive. But everything is going to change, faster and faster. Ironically, Agile training classes will not be able to keep up because everything is going to be agile. Been there. Done that. I’ve seen it all before. In just a few years, we will ask machines to guide us through our work-lives. And that’s why we are going to witness the collapse of the agile training industry. There will be no more agile courses because Agile will be the new normal.

Why bother teaching people what iterations are when the software that they use can show them? Why spend time storing knowledge about agile practices in people’s heads when machines will be able to guide us through our work-lives? There is definitely no need to teach anyone agile leadership practices or team building practices when any leader or creative worker can just ask their machines for assistance.

Why spend time storing knowledge about agile practices in people’s heads when machines will be able to guide us through our work-lives?

Navigation and Exploration

Don’t get me wrong. Workshops will still exist in the future. There will always be a need for people to get away from their work, meet with new people, and enjoy new insights. But the focus will shift from studying and training to navigating and exploring. By focusing on the discovery of knowledge, rather than the transfer of knowledge, we have the opportunity to liberate the power of the human mind and to refocus workshops on what it means to be human: creativity, empathy, mystery… We will not be patiently listening in agile courses to what others already know and storing that in our heads for later reproduction. Instead, we will prefer to explore what few people know and we will store what we found in machines, so that it can be served up at the moment when someone needs it. No more agile courses.

The Agile training industry is going to collapse. It is inevitable.

But this time, I am not going to escape from this industry before it all collapses.

Come check out the future of agile practices with guides from Gamestorming, Core Protocols, Management 3.0, and more.

Our team feels so embarrassed.

One of the mantras for startups is, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. — Reid Hoffman (investor and co-founder)

As a startup, you should speed up your rate of learning. You can only learn fast when you deliver rapidly and often. Many non-essential product features should not be ready because that would delay your chance of learning about the essential features. And that means you will feel embarrassed because you’re offering people a barely working product.

Which is exactly what our team is doing.

Two days ago, we started offering our Mind Settlers app to a small number of agile coaches who signed up for early access. The first people are now playing with our app! Argghh! They will see that the look-and-feel needs significant improvement. They will see some bugs and strange behaviors. They will find that some things are clunky, ugly, or simply missing. And they will notice there is no iOS version, no web version, no registration, no dashboard… almost nothing, basically.

It’s so embarrassing. Our entire team is hiding in the bushes.

But…

Players see an evolving ecosystem rather than a static framework.

They see step-by-step guides rather than maturity model assessments.

They see Gamestorming, Core Protocols, Management 3.0, and other brands.

In other words, we hope that the early players see the future of agile practices and that they will forgive us for the thousand ways in which our idea is not perfect yet.

Together with our first players, by learning as fast as we can, we hope to realize that future soon.

Mascots make all the difference. With a doll or puppet in your hands, it’s easier to receive constructive criticism from your teammates in a 360-Degree Meeting. Peer-to-peer feedback is important, but it doesn’t have to be painful.

Our Agility Scales team recently organized its first 360-Degree Meeting. We had been working with each other for over a month, and we considered it necessary to learn from each other’s feedback on a regular basis. But how can a team do that without delegating the process to an HR department and then being drowned in forms, tools, and interviews?

I did a bit of digging around and found some common sense tips:

Get people together in a room exchanging feedback with each other, rather than asking them to fill out anonymous forms about each other.

As the leader or facilitator, be the first one to ask for feedback. It shows courage and openness, and you set an example for others to follow.

Make sure everyone gets more appreciation than criticism because compliments motivate us more, while criticism has a bigger impact on our feelings.

I turned these and other tips into several step-by-step guides, available in our Mind Settlers app and published on the Impact Spheres blog:

But the best tip was not mentioned in any of the sources that I explored. It came from Thomas, our agile coach. He told everyone to bring a puppet, doll, or other type of mascot to the 360-degree meeting. Thomas explained that criticism is easier to handle when you receive it together with your mascot. Strong feedback is less likely to blow you away when you can hold onto something. Even if it’s just a wooden figure with a painted face.

Criticism is easier to handle when you receive it together with your mascot.

Bringing a mascot sounded like a silly idea, but it worked like a charm! When it was time to ask for improvement suggestions, each of us held up our mascot. It was fun, and it felt good. Peer-to-peer feedback is important, but it doesn’t have to be painful.

Are you going to organize 360-Feedback Meetings with your team?

Check out the Mind Setters app or explore the guides mentioned earlier in this article.

A purpose is not about having one official, carefully crafted mission statement. Transform your company purpose into the right shape, in the right place, at the right time.

My team is making fun of me.It’s my own fault.

I keep reminding our team of the purpose of the company. For example, at the start of our weekly progress meeting, I ask a random team member, “What is our purpose?” During our collocated, face-to-face meetings (the next one is scheduled in London), I make sure that we review our team’s purpose at some point. And now and then, I make a subtle (or not-so-subtle) hint on our Slack channels or in the comments on our Trello board.

I even turned the concept of repeating the purpose into a weekly guide, which is available in our new Mind Settlers app: Prepare Your Purpose Story. Once per week, I look at my agenda and ask myself, “Where I can inject a reference to our company’s purpose?” This might happen during a conference talk at an event, in an interview with a journalist, in a podcast discussion with another author, or in a blog post such as this one.

The purpose of Agility Scales is to help organizations become shapeshifters. This means that they can continuously transform themselves into the right shape, in the right place, at the right time. We want to contribute to shifting teams into better shapes.

I use different words each time. Because a purpose is not about having one official, carefully crafted mission statement. The shared idea stays the same, but the exact words change from day to day, from one situation to the other. Sometimes, I have only ten seconds to explain what our company is for; sometimes, I can discuss our purpose for ten minutes. In a way, our purpose itself is a shapeshifter too: to be as effective as possible, it changes its form depending on context.

The shared idea stays the same, but the exact words change from day to day, from one situation to the other.

Sometimes, I use visuals instead of words. In my presentations, I show photos and movie clips from Barbapapa (a children’s cartoon), Odo (Star Trek Deep Space Nine), T1000 (Terminator 2), and Mystique (X-Men). All of them are shapeshifters. And they all have the talent to transform into the right shape, in the right place, at the right time.

That’s why my team is sometimes teasing me. In answer to my repeated question, “What is our purpose?” they sometimes say things such as, “bla bla shapeshifter bla bla bla” and then they start laughing. They experiment to find the smallest form they can get away with while staying faithful to the shared idea.

I don’t mind. It means they understand.

One of our team members is on vacation in France, the birthplace of Barbapapa. He sent us a photo of what he found in a bookstore. No words. Just a photo:

Perfect!

It’s yet another reminder of the purpose of our company.

Does your company have a purpose?Does everyone know what it is?Are you all reminding each other?

Check out these guides:

This is the static version of a guide that is available for you in Mind Settlers, the app that will develop an agile mindset with dynamic, evolving practices for coaches, consultants and agile teams, in a playful, feedback-rich environment.

How do I convince my manager to give me a promotion?How do I convince my manager to let me work from home?How do I convince my manager to delegate more to our team?

No matter where I travel, I keep hearing different versions of the same question: How do I persuade managers to be more agile? To introduce self-organizing teams? To celebrate learning failure?

It seems as if people don’t realize that persuasion and influencing are among the oldest skills in the world, ever since caveman Ugh had a pile of twigs and his sister Oww made a flint stone.

How to Persuade People

In his book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink wrote that the average person nowadays spends 40% of their time convincing other people to do (or not do) things. Some people, including marketers, politicians, and leaders, have even turned that activity into full-time jobs. Is managing up significantly different from managing down or managing sideways? I doubt it.

When people ask me how they can convince their managers to try new leadership practices, sometimes I tell them to first understand what their managers want. Sometimes, I tell them to first increase their credibility by delivering on commitments. Sometimes, I tell them to never ask for a change and to always suggest an experiment. No matter what I reply, I always see people in the audience nodding thoughtfully and writing vigorously. It’s as if I just shared with them some deep insight that nobody had before.

Of course, I share nothing new.

The social research into the art of persuasion and influencing is broad and deep. There is hardly any difference between persuading customers versus suppliers. It is almost irrelevant whether you are trying to convince investors or business partners. And I am sure that it’s of little practical consequence whether you are leading the managers downward or managing the leaders upward. They are all human beings, suffering from the same biases and falling for the same tricks.

The social research into the art of persuasion and influencing is broad and deep.

How to Persuade Your Manager

Did you know it’s easier to get “Yes” to a big request from anyone when you got them to say “Yes” to a smaller request some time earlier? Your boss is just as sensitive to this trick as anyone else.

To make it easy for you, I included the most common suggestions in two new guides:

The dynamic and up-to-date versions of both guides are available in our Mind Settlers app. Have fun with them. Good luck! And let me know how your manager responded. :-)

This is the static version of a guide that is available for you in Mind Settlers, the app that will develop an agile mindset with dynamic, evolving practices for coaches, consultants and agile teams, in a playful, feedback-rich environment.